Windows Tip: Drag and drop RunAs
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In a previous issue of Windows In The Enterprise newsletter, I talked about the pain of running as a LUA (least-privileged user account) on a daily basis, and I shared a personal experience to highlight the difficulties ordinary users can face doing this. I hope you felt my pain.
I'm always on the lookout for new ways of doing LUA so I can maintain the security of my computer while still keeping things manageable. Today I'll share a cool tip that was forwarded to me by someone inside Microsoft.
Say you're running as an ordinary (non-admin) user on a laptop running Windows XP and you want to temporarily open Internet Explorer (or any other program) as Administrator. Start by creating a text file and copy/paste the following into the file:
set LINK=%1 set LINK=%LINK:"=\"% runas /user:desk99\Administrator "cmd /c %LINK%" |
where you need to replace desk99 with the name of your own computer. Save this file on your desktop as RunAsAdmin.cmd or something similar (note the .cmd extension). Now when you drag a program file (or a shortcut to a program file) onto the icon for RunAsAdmin.cmd, a command prompt appears asking you for the password for the Administrator account. Type this password and press ENTER, and the program will launch using Administrator credentials.
I think this is pretty cool, so I keep a series of shortcuts to programs like Computer Management, Event Viewer, Command Prompt etc. on my desktop, and whenever I want to run one of these as Administrator, I just drag it onto RunAsAdmin.cmd, type a password, and off I go. An easy way to put these shortcuts on your desktop is to open Administrative Tools in Control Panel and right-click on each tool icon and select Send To | Desktop, which creates a shortcut for that tool on your desktop.
What tips or tricks to you use to ease the pain of running as a non-admin? Feel free to share them with me and I'll try and mention them in a future issue of this newsletter.
ITworld.com
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